The world is just a frame. What contains others sets you free. There is nowhere you cannot be and no prison you cannot escape; in the web of possibilities, you are at the center.

The effort comes from the heart and carries through to the muscles. At first, it's localized. It tingles. Like flexing a tired muscle, it might even hurt. Then it spreads from the tips of your fingers and travels up your arm, as your nerve endings stretch further apart, sensation begins to fade. This keeps going until you stop exerting. It's a mounting weakness, with your muscles straining, your bones thinning, and your body's density in flux. If you reach too far, balance is what fails you first. Then it is the Law of the Lever that betrays you, as your bones struggle to prop up the exponentially rising weight of your hand. Meanwhile, your brain screams at you. It makes you sweat, makes you tremble, makes your heart race and ache in your chest. Your brain is the last thing holding you back. It cannot comprehend your heightened state, and still sees traps where only opportunities lie. It's not its fault. Unlike the rest of you, it's only human.

It's an exquisite discomfort, pushing yourself through a passageway half your width. You feel your muscles unroll, your bones dislodge, and your skin drag across the surface. You can move so little, yet achieve so much, because nothing holds you back; you're never stuck, and there's always a path so long as you keep solving the puzzle of your flesh. One hand after another. A lurch forward, a leg unwound. The fading of the senses--ears melted against the metal, eyes sunken into your skull, an absence of touch--and the focusing on the mind. Everything simplifies. There's only a goal and a path; everything else is liquid.

Freedom comes by degrees. You acquaint yourself with it by means of a cold breath, and the warm comfort of a body exhausted. Gravity is your ally, it carries you when you grow heavy. You stand up and take a deep breath, and your cells rearrange. Your body consolidates itself, and feeling crashes on you like a wave, a tingling across your whole body, a million billion ants crawling in your skin.

It's rapture. You can do anything, and nothing can stop you.

No one can stop you.

The world is a frame, and you are the picture.